The Thigh's The Limit

Our Beauty Adventuress finally conquers her curves—under the knife

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If I look like a woman who has been seeing the man of her dreams, I am. I've finally met someone who understands my needs and wants and secret desires and who makes me feel beautiful even when I'm naked with the lights on and the blinds up and the neighbors waving. I fell hard and fast, but not before doing a background check. While he didn't have me at "hello," he did have me at "my liposuction technique inexplicably results in what I call an invisible butt lift." I swooned.

Fate drew me to Gerald H. Pitman, MD—fate and Dennis Gross, my dermatologist and oracle. A human Magic 8-Ball, Gross always has the answer. Like, if he's injecting a pimple and I ask, "Do you think I'll fall in love this year?" he'll say, "Outlook good." So when I told him I was researching liposuction methods for last June's column on SmartLipo (a retarded procedure), he said I couldn't write about lipo without first consulting Pitman, a fat-sucking pioneer (4,000 procedures and counting) who literally wrote the textbook: Liposuction and Aesthetic Surgery.

Months after interviewing him, my head is still filled with triple-X fantasies...wearing a swimsuit, buying jeans, ditching my Spanx! I find myself Googling him, casing his understated Upper East Side office, drunk-dialing his answering service.... Could it be that after years of saving myself I was ready to cross the Rubicon, bite the apple, do the deed? Was I really considering losing my plastic-surgery virginity?

My whole life I've been pear-shaped. The only way I could thin my lower half was by going to extremes. Speed, diet pills, liquid diets, starvation, barfation, over-exercise-ation—all ending in self-loathing lamentation. I gave it all up after college because the obsession was a full-time job, and I had to find employment that paid the rent. Besides, I got tired of my body begging me to let it be what it wanted to be—biggish. It would be great to tell you that I learned to love and accept and embrace my Weeble shape, but no. I didn't. I don't. I hope I never will. Because the next thing you know, I'll be dyeing my own hair, wearing Cashmiracle sweaters and polyester pants, drinking beer out of a plastic cup, and screaming, "Bingo!" Another one of my dark fantasies.

Not unlike losing my virginity, my decision to engage in plastic surgery involved great debate, a lot of fear, much excitement, lying to my parents, and the burning question: Is he the guy to do it with? My friends weigh in. "Don't do it," Jo says. "You're not that kind of person." I'm thinking I am that kind of person.

Virginia had the most persuasive perspective: "What's the biggie? It's not like you're doing your eyes. The thighs are not the windows to the soul."

I went to ask the oracle. For 10 years he's heard me rail and wail, and live on the scale to no avail. So when I said, "To lipo or not to lipo, that is the question," Gross gave himself a good shake and turned upside down with the answer: "Signs point to yes."

One week later, I'm back in Pitman's office, naked, being pinched and measured under the watchful eye of my friend Liesl, who, like Michael, wants to have her boobs done—in the other direction. Her husband is making her choose between implants and a new garage. Gabrielle, the nurse, notes that I've gained five pounds in the two months since my last visit. Smiling, Pitman observes, "You made a bigger target." Exactly. Once I decided to do it, I ate my way up to the event. It was a metaphorical flipping of the bird to those fat cells that have been the bane of my existence. I'm sure they were like:

"Oh, chocolate cake! Yummy! Yummy!"

"We love a pizza at midnight!"

"Yay! She got the popcorn and the Raisinets!"

Those fat fuckers are going to be sucked out so fast their heads will spin. See ya!

"Cross your arms in front of your chest," Pitman says, analyzing me from behind. My left hip is a centimeter higher than my right. "Every person has one higher and lower," he says. "Your left thigh is larger than your right, too." As for the rear view: "You're nice and round. I like it round, but not so full, just a little bit less." My main goal is to unload the saddlebags that are the only things coming between me and a size 6.

"Holly, if you're going to stay this weight forever, I would do your inner thighs too." I'm not going to stay this weight forever, but I tell him to suck out a space anyway. I want to be able to touch my feet together and see between my legs. I'll be damned if there won't be a first time for everything.

From the moment we're born, we start manufacturing fat cells, a process that stops just after adolescence. The average person, Pitman says, ends up with "40 billion—give or take 10 billion." Those cells are permanent, changing size as we gain or lose weight. Liposuction, which costs between $8,000 and $20,000, is also permanent. If you remove fat from one area and gain weight, you're going to regain it in other areas, most commonly in areas that were not treated, such as the back, arms, and breasts. My personal theory is that you should never take out more than you're willing to put on somewhere else.

There are approximately 750 cubic centimeters in a pound. All added up—100 ccs here, 200 ccs there...Pitman predicts the total amount of fat removed from my hips and thighs will be less than two pounds, or the equivalent of three cups of oil. (The patient average is five.) While it's not much, it will be two pounds of squatter cells I've spent my entire life trying to evict. But I'm not going to put them out onto the street. No, I'm going to relocate them to a better neighborhood: my lips and nasolabial folds. As Pitman puts it, fat cells are "the gold standard" of fillers. I tried collagen and Restylane, but they dissipated inside of two months. Fat micrografting, however, if done properly, is long lasting, even permanent. Using a teensy needle, Pitman injects the fat into the area in delicate strands the size of saffron threads. This allows room for healthy tissue to envelop the strands and grow into them, feeding them blood and oxygen. "I'm very meticulous about putting the fat there," Pitman says. "If you're not, it doesn't last long-term."

Knowing some fat cells won't survive in their new habitat, Pitman slightly "overcorrects" the area. Lips being supersensitive, they swell big-time. And not just the lips. "This whole area," he says, indicating my lower face. "You're not going to be able to do an interview with anybody for a month. You are definitely not going to be presentable for two weeks. Three weeks, you'll still be swollen, but presentable. But...well, your lips will probably look like those of the actress you're interviewing—depending who it is. She'll be jealous!" In the end, "Your lips won't be any bigger than they've ever been; I'm just going to replenish the fat you've lost as you've grown older—maybe 1 cc in upper and lower. [One cc is the liquid equivalent of one fifth of a teaspoon.] But you're going to swell a lot." He smiles. "You're getting brave."

Gabrielle gives me a shopping list and strict instructions. I'm to buy two compression girdles, Chux Underpads, and reusable cold packs. In the two weeks before surgery, I can't take aspirin, vitamin E, or multivitamins; drink wine; or eat grape products (which are blood thinners and cause excess bruising). Two days prior to surgery, I can't drink any alcohol, something I haven't tried since Lent of 1979.

Handing me prescriptions for an antibiotic and a painkiller, Gabrielle reminds me that I'll need someone to pick me up from the hospital after the surgery and stay with me for the first 48 hours. Liesl, a mother-earth type, boldly volunteers. Before leaving, I write a check—they don't accept credit cards, so no frequent-flier miles! Whaaa!—and say goodbye to Pitman. I'm nervous, but I tell him I'm just going to lie down on the table, throw up a prayer, and trust his skills. "Rest assured," he replies. "The prayer you don't need."

The next time we meet it's 7 a.m. at Manhattan's Eye, Ear, and Throat Hospital and Pitman is wearing scrubs and a fetching brown surgeon's cap printed with yellow daisies. He Magic-Markers up my body. A triathlete, he looks sexy in scrubs—less austere. Come to think of it, every guy here in scrubs looks sexy. Sexy and disease-free. Why didn't I go to nursing school? Introducing himself, my anesthesiologist, David Silver, MD, places an anti-nausea patch behind my ear and slips an IV in my arm. I ask him if he'll give me an extra patch to take home, as I plan to drink myself sick if I make it out of here alive. "You can keep this one on through the weekend," he says.

I pad into the surgical area, and Pitman paints me with brown solution from head to toe. I lie down. Silver says he wants to test my IV drip...and the next thing I know, I'm waking up to the sound of women barfing all around me. Poor bastards. Silver gets a gold star.

Things are a little foggy. A nurse puts ice packs on my mouth and Liesl appears and I love the sandals she's wearing and I go to the bathroom and I'm wearing my Zippered Tram Flap Girdle with a big hole in the crotch so I can pee and Liesl and I eat graham crackers and she takes me to the lobby in a wheelchair and goes out to hail a cab and a young girl is looking at me and I am her and my father is taking me on his hospital rounds and I see a woman in a wheelchair in a big hat and black sunglasses and God, was I ever that young? Am I really this old? Am I really this kind of person?

Liesl and I are in the cab riding four blocks home, and I feel strange but good, exhaling the smell of anesthesia. Inside my studio, she keeps telling me to lie down, but I make a chicken salad sandwich on rye toast and eat the whole thing with my mouth blown up to the size and shape of an adult male orangutan.

And still more swelling. Eating is not a problem; drinking is. A flexy straw saves my life. Not a straight straw, a flexy. There's no other way to get the liquid in you, unless you're doing beer bongs. The first night is hardest. No pain to speak of, just constant ice packs on the lower face to keep the swelling to a minimum (a joke). Then there's the leaking.

Simply put, in tumescent liposuction the area is flooded with saline solution spiked with both lidocaine to numb the nerves and adrenaline to shrink the blood vessels. Fat, being the lightest and weakest of all tissues, floats around in the saltwater, which is then sucked back out of you using a cannula two to three millimeters thick. The incisions are so small—in my case one in the center of each cheek, one in each buttock crease, two in the front groin—that no stitches are required. So for the first 24 hours, I'm in bed discharging fluid from the holes in my body. Hence, the Chux Underpads—large, square, plastic-backed cotton pads that keep you from ruining your 600-thread-count sheets. The drainage is disgusting. I'm telling you, I leaked like Scooter Libby in the White House pressroom.

For four days I live in the girdle, removing it only to shower or switch to a clean one. On the fifth day I'm standing in Pitman's office with Liesl. Other than the expected heavy bruising, my hindquarters look good, smaller. My lower face and mouth, however, are black and blue and still full-blown. I'd told the guy at the deli I was in a car accident. Pitman assures me that in time, it will be perfect. But how does he know for sure? Years of trial and error? "More trial. Less error."

Having spent the past five days housebound, I decide Liesl and I will walk the mile back to my apartment. Within the first block I can feel all eyes on me. By the third block I sense an undercurrent of aggression in the staring. Feeling it too, Liesl says, "I want you to look at me while we're talking." Why? "Because we're in plastic surgery alley, and all these women are looking at you with smirks on their faces. It makes me sick. I want them to see there's nothing freakish about what you've done, that you're in the world, engaged in life, and not paying attention to them." Were I to have the surgery again, I'd do it in the winter, when I could go outside with a scarf around my lower face.

After two more weeks, the lips are incrementally deflating, but the bruising is still dark purple and unsightly. I call my brother Paul and confess what I've done, and he, an MD who also practices Eastern medicine, tells me to run out and buy arnica gel (not the pellets) and keep applying it liberally to the area. I was spending the weekend with my editor Rachael, and as she is my witness, I swear to God my bruising was gone by Sunday night. It vanished. That fast.

And so I had the last laugh. By the end of the month my lips were the lips I had in college, and my thighs were the thighs I'd never had, and my bottom? "Wow, it looks great," Pitman says, watching me prance around the room at my four-month follow-up. "Look how your cheeks have lifted! You got the invisible butt lift!"

All true. Honestly, although I sucked out a couple pounds, I now weigh more than usual. But the extra weight doesn't bother me one bit because I'm in proportion now. I sold my medical scale on eBay.

I know I'll catch hell for this, but I wish I'd lipo'd ages ago—it would have spared me years of self-criticism and dieting. Then again, I hadn't yet met the man of my dreams—the one who put my body and sense of self into proportion. But as your beauty adventuress, I implore you, don't rely on luck before you suck. A lot of doctors will tell you they can perform lipo, but you have to do your homework. Find a certified plastic surgeon who specializes in the procedure. As Pitman told me the first time I met him, "The three most dangerous words in plastic surgery are `it's just liposuction.' "